Motivational Speaker Blog

How you go about the matter of your work makes the work matter.

Most people dread the guest speaker Question & Answer ( Q&A) Session- that's because most Q&A session are really poorly run. They are often treated like an after thought, as opposed to a pre- planned part of the learning.

I was recently a motivational speaker for a large Bankers Conference. At the end of the speech, the CEO of a large midwestern bank chased me down to share his leadership philosophy.

Over the years, the CEO has evolved his customer service philosophy to do things FOR people not TO them.

According to the wise CEO, when you do things for people, you serve and help them. When you do things to people you punish or torture them.

Most banks routinely do things TO people. We fine our customers late charges, we charge them interest to borrow money, we assess them fees for holding accounts. These are often seen as actions done to customers.

In any business, it is so easy to get caught up in doing things to people while forgetting why you are in business in the first place. Ultimately, any organization (to survive) needs to be providing a service that supports and helps others.

For instance, couples taking out a mortgage are buying a home. As a financial provider, if you can help them make a major decision that will support their families' livelihood- you are truly helping them.

Doing things to people means your wielding rules at customers to force them to comply. When doing things for customers, you are using your knowledge, products and service to really help them.

In many cases, the nuance is subtle. For instance, the example the CEO gave me is.... if we charge a fee for late payment, we are doing this to someone. However, now we try to contact the customer to let them know they are in overdraft and discuss their options, we are doing this for them.

For the Midwestern bank, customers appreciate that they are flexible to their needs and supportive of their unique situation.

Get Motivational Speaker, Jody Urquhart's  Book, All Work & No SAY

When it comes to safety, what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

The dictionary definition of Integrity is the state of being whole and undivided.

On August 18, 2015, I am a motivational speaker for the Hillsborough County Public Schools nutrition staff  conference.

To keep people awake, engaged and interested in a meeting, have all participants stand up.

I was recently a motivational speaker for a school, where I had the pleasure of hearing the school principle give a motivational speech.

She told the story how on her first crack at being a teacher, she stepped into a classroom full of rowdy students. Throughout the speech, she outlined some great ideas to turn chaos to calm when you Inherit a rowdy group.

Jody Urquhart has several Interactive Keynote Safety Motivational Speeches called:

In their book, SWITCH: How to Change Things when Change is Hard, authors and motivational speakers, Chip and Dan Heath use an interesting analogy to illustrate why we act faster as individuals then we do in group.

The authors suggest that if you were with one other person in a room and that person suffered a heart attack, you would leap into action.

If that same person suffered a heart attack in a room full of other people, you would pause, survey the room,observe others reaction and possibly take action if nobody else did.

What the analogy illustrates is our reaction times are slower in a group because people tend to do things after we see our peers doing them. We follow the crowd.

In another example, obesity is shown to be contagious among our peers.  A Harvard study that lasted over 36 years found that when someone becomes obese, the odds that their friends will become obese triples. The research shows, we instinctively change our idea of what is an acceptable weight by looking at our peers.

The authors and speakers further argue that drinking is contagious, so is marriage, politeness( or lack of) and many other things.

We imitate the behaviour of others, especially when the situation is unfamiliar, like when we go through ambiguous situations and are forced to change.

Thus, if you are trying to get a team to change, it pays to be aware of social cues. Others mimic these cues, so use this to your advantage.

The authors also point to the hotel towel example.

Hotels bathrooms typically display signs to implore guests to reuse hotel towels by asking them to consider the environment. One hotel used another approach, they posted a sign that said the majority of guests reuse their towels at least once during their stay.